The nerdiest newspaper correction of all time

Luke Broadwater

On Sunday, the New York Times ran what is most likely the nerdiest newspaper correction of all time.

Clarifying a baseball article entitled "R.A. Dickey's Well-Named Arsenal," about Mets pitcher R.A. Dickey's bats (which are named after swords found in epic fantasy literature), the Times' correction used the phrases "Bilbo Baggins in the Misty Mountains," "the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield," and "Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver."

An item in the Extra Bases baseball notebook last Sunday misidentified, in some editions, the origin of the name Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver, which Mets pitcher R. A. Dickey gave one of his bats. Orcrist was not, as Dickey had said, the name of the sword used by Bilbo Baggins in the Misty Mountains in “The Hobbit”; Orcrist was the sword used by the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in the book. (Bilbo Baggins’s sword was called Sting.)